Bai language

The Baip/Bai language (Baip: Baip‧ngvp‧zix; simplified Chinese: 白语; traditional Chinese: 白語; pinyin: Báiyǔ) is a language spoken in China, primarily in Yunnan province, by the Bai people, one of the 56 ethnic groups officially recognized by the People's Republic of China. The language has over a million speakers and is divided into three main dialects. It is a tone language with eight tones and a rather rich set of vowels. As is common among Southeast Asian languages, the vowels of Baip have a phonemic opposition between tense vowels and lax vowels (creaky voice vs. normal voice). There exists a small amount of traditional literature written with Chinese characters, as well as a number of recent publications printed with a recently standardized system of romanisation.

Classification

The position of this language (or language group) within the Sino-Tibetan family is undetermined. Traditionally, Baip has been considered to be a Tibeto-Burman language, but starting with R.A.D. Forrest in 1948, the rival argument has been made that it is instead an offshoot of Proto-Sinitic, coordinate with Old Chinese. Within the last generation, this argument has been taken up by Sergei Starostin, G. van Driem, and S. Zhengzhang. The state of the debate on the genetic position of Baip is surveyed by Wang (2005), who points out that the proper investigation of the issue is hampered by the fact that Proto-Bai, the ancestor of the three modern dialects, has yet to be reconstructed. Indeed, the dialects themselves have not yet all been thoroughly described.

The question is complicated by the fact that Baip vocabulary has been influenced over millennia by both neighboring Tibeto-Burman languages and several varieties of Chinese. The Sinologist Norman stated: "While it would probably be going too far to consider Bái a Sinitic [Chinese] dialect, its close links to Sinitic cannot easily be dismissed." ^[1]

Grammar

Baip has a basic syntactic order of Subject-Verb-Object (SVO).

Varieties

Within the core Bai area, three dialects are recognized, which may actually be distinct languages: Jianchuan (Central), Dali (Southern), and Bijiang (Northern). Jianchuan and Dali are close, and speakers are reported to be able to understand one another after living together for a month. Bijiang is more divergent.

Notes

Bibliography

• Lee Yeon-ju & Sagart, L. 1998. The strata of Bai. Paper presented at the 31st ICSTLL, University of Lund, Sweden, Sep. 30 – Oct. 4, 1998.
• Matisoff, J. A. 2001. On the genetic position of Bai within Tibeto-Burman. Paper presented at the 34th International Conference on Sino-Tibetan languages and linguistics, Yunnan minzu xueyuan.
• Starostin, Sergej. 1995. “The historical position of Bai”. Moskovskij Lingvisticheskij Zhurnal 1:174-190. Moscow.
• Norman, Jerry. 2003. The Chinese dialects: phonology. In Graham Thurgood and Randy J. LaPolla, eds., The Sino-Tibetan Languages. Routledge. Routledge language family series. Chapter 5, 72ff.
• Wang, Feng. 2005. On the genetic position of the Bai language. Cahiers de Linguistique - Asie Orientale. 34(1):101–127. Paris.
• Wang, Feng. 2006. Comparison of languages in contact: the distillation method and the case of Bai. Language and Linguistics Monograph Series B: Frontiers in Linguistics III. Taipei: Institute of Linguistics, Academia Sinica, 2006.
• Wiersma, Grace. 1990. Investigation of the Bai (Minjia) language along historical lines. PhD dissertation, University of California at Berkeley.

External links

• An old poem in Bai characters with IPA and translation in Chinese